The RSE Blog has been moved to a new home in GitHub Pages, where we have started to regularly post about exciting events we have been involved with or technical issues worth discussing or explaining.
We are very excited about this adventure and want to see it a great success so, please, follow that new page and share it with your colleagues and friends!
by Chris Cave-Ayland
In the Imperial RSE Team we make extensive use of continuous integration (CI) with
GitHub Actions. We use CI to ensure our projects build and are correct across a range of
scenarios (OS, python version, dependency version, etc.). Widely accepted wisdom is that
it is best practice to catch issues early via frequent and thorough CI rather than to
catch them later. This must however be set against the monetary and environment cost of
running unnecessary compute workloads on every push to GitHub. In particular, the
pricing structure of GitHub Actions means workloads run on Windows and MacOS are more
costly (certainly financially and presumably environmentally). This is particularly the
case for private repositories for which Imperial has a fixed budget of minutes.
I recently received a new MacBook Pro for work. Great! The only catch is that Apple discontinued their Intel-based line of MacBook Pros in 2021 and their new line of laptops use the Apple silicon M-series coprocessors. This might not seem like a problem at first, but the Apple silicon processors use ARM-architecture instead of Intel’s x86 architecture. For Python development, this is a potential problem because not all Python packages are installable for ARM architectures.
Michelle Barker, Jeremy Cohen, Daniel Nüst, Toby Hodges, Serah Njambi Rono, Lou Woodley
On Wednesday 17th March 2021, around 50 individuals from a wide range of different countries and time zones came together for the first of two 2-hour sessions that formed our “Building Research Software Communities: How to increase engagement in your community” workshop.
Run as part of the SORSE Series of Online Research Software Events, this workshop brought together an organising team consisting of 3 members of the international research software community and a group of speakers including experts in community engagement and sustainability. In this blog post we provide an overview of the workshop and some of the key messages and outcomes.
This post was compiled by Mark Woodbridge, Jeremy Cohen and Tony Yang of Imperial College’s Research Software Community.
As COVID-19 drives us into uncharted territory, many of us at Imperial will be having our first ever experience of working off-campus for an extended period of time. It, of course, depends on our role, but many members of the College community will be no stranger to mobile working – pitching up at one of the many campus cafes, breakout spaces or a coffee shop, getting out our laptop or mobile device and switching very quickly into a state of focused work. Maybe finishing those next couple of paragraphs of a paper or report, fixing that annoying bug in our scientific code that someone just reported, or responding to an urgent technical query from a collaborator. Sometimes a change of space or environment provides just that little shift in perspective that you need to help solve that challenging technical problem, or get the right wording for that difficult section of the paper, much more quickly than if you’d sat in your office staring at your screen for hours!